


you're worth more than how this city lets you down

by eudaimon



Category: Ripper Street
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-18
Updated: 2015-12-18
Packaged: 2018-05-07 12:23:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5456438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/pseuds/eudaimon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Like London, Fred Best endures.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you're worth more than how this city lets you down

**Author's Note:**

  * For [notkingyet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/notkingyet/gifts).



> HAPPY YULETIDE!

Keep these things in mind, or nothing which follows will seem miraculous:

When Fred Best dies, his body lies undiscovered for a day or more in a gutter, tumbled, the fine fabric of his suit torn and bloodied. They retrieve him and wrap him in a clean sheet. He is cared for. He is, at the last, loved.

They bury him in one of the many crowded, storied cemeteries of the East End. Tears are shed. Some of them are even meant.

But, like many things, like the Truth, Fred Best is harder to kill than that.  
Three days after his death, like Jesus Christ himself returned in splendour, Fred Best comes returns to Whitechapel.

*

He finds himself now capable of the most amazing feats. He can spring from ground to roof-stop in a single step; his hands are cold, clammy but, at his core, a furnace burns. He cannot, he finds, return to the places that he went before his metamorphosis; he has changed shape since then, takes up more space than he used to, will not fit into spaces which previously would have fitted him like a glove. Instead, he haunts London's skyline, going here and there, reacquainting himself with the city that he has known since birth. Fred has always had rather particular tastes but even he could find room in his heart for such a city. London has always cared for her own - of this much he is most undoubtedly certain. London loves all of her children but, most particularly, he thinks that she favours her children in the East, among the jumbled rookeries and laneways. Oh, how she must have wept in the high days of the Ripper, when blood stained cobbles. Oh, how purely she must have loved a man like Edmund Reid, a man so miraculous that he still lived and breathed when his obituary was written, a man who died on paper, but walked away and lived, all the same.

Fred's starting to think that he can see the trick of it.

*

_SPRING-HEELED JACK RIDES AGAIN_ , scream the banner headlines. _MONSTER RETURNS TO STALK THE EAST END_. _WILL WE NEVER BE SAFE IN OUR BEDS?_.

Long past the need for eating and drinking, Fred finds spiritual sustenance in those front pages, the hysteria that drips from the copy. He traces the byline with his thumbnail, the lines of the scratchy artist's renderings that show a shape strangely similar to his own.

*

A single lamp still burns. The surgery is dim and quiet, the air ripe with the scent of strong alcohol. Fred pauses, drags one gloved fingers through a pool of bourbon spilled on a counter-top. This place has always smelled the same, any time that Fred has had cause to call. What he's come to realise, now more than ever, is that places take on the qualities of the people that inhabit them; a body might leave an echo behind to remember it by. Captain Homer Jackson is a man full of piss and vinegar, war and thunder - he cannot help but change the world by being in it.

While they may not have always seen eye to eye, Fred can, at least, see something of the aesthetic about Captain Jackson. He sprawls in a chair, one booted foot thrown out, hair rumpled across his forehead and, at least for the moment, his face relaxed in sleep. Fred has toyed with thought of this before - a midnight visit - but he's always found himself pulled up short by the thought of _what good would it do_? He is beyond the power of medical arts. He feels no cold. He experiences no pain. If you cut him, to borrow a phrase from Shakespeare, he would not bleed.

But perhaps there could be another sort of healing that he might still find himself receptive to? If what a man is made of might be said to boil down to more than merely the beating of his bloody heart?

He cannot imbibe any longer, of course, but the smell is, perhaps, comforting. He pours a measure and holds the glass under his nose, inhaling as he watches the Captain sleep.

It could be hours. It could be minutes. He has, it seems, no use for time as living men count it.

Jackson stirs. His eyelashes flutter. He wakes up by degrees. Fred Best has known many men in his time on this earth. He has been lucky enough to know love with a few of them (what emotion exists between himself and Captain Jackson could not be said to be anything like love). However, he sees the other man now with renewed clarity. Looking at the man in front of him, he can see the echoes of who he was - the man who is now Homer Jackson gives way to Matthew Judge, to the boy who he was before him, back and back. An army of ghosts.

He understands now how a man might make himself from nothing; what might be built, after everything was said and done, out of embers and ash.

How a life might continue, in one form or another.  
Which is comforting, when it comes to it.

*

The river Thames flows through London, stitching the two halves of the city together, brown and fast and eternal. Walking beside her, near the Tower which has stood guard over the City this many years, Fred thinks about how some things are eternal, but many things are not. He imagines what they must look like from above - how London must like a heart, many ventricled, bleeding light. What he knows now is that his life, his _existence_ has no boundaries, no natural beginning or end. He could continue forever. He might create himself anew, retain only those parts of Fred Best which are worthy of love, of praise. He could be a man who is, perhaps, worthy of love. He may write whatever stories he wishes. 

The whole world lies open before him, with London at its centre, dotted with other similar cities. Light, areas of darkness like pockets of lymph, hearts upon hearts upon hearts. 

These endless days, he feels too much to have only one.


End file.
